


home is wherever i'm with you

by d0nquix0te



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-23
Updated: 2013-11-23
Packaged: 2018-01-02 11:15:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1056110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/d0nquix0te/pseuds/d0nquix0te
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's six years and a ton of misunderstandings between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	home is wherever i'm with you

“Tell me about you and Laura.”

Derek’s hand goes still, halfway through turning a page of his book. His eyes become unfocused and his face suddenly closes off – a reaction that Cora had easily predicted. She’d hoped for something else, a kind of reaction that would tell her he’s made some sort of peace. Instead it’s the reaction of festering grief. 

“Why the sudden interest?” he snaps back. 

Cora figures she deserves his short temper. They haven’t properly talked about the six years they missed of each other’s lives and yet Cora has spent a lot of time judging Derek’s choices anyway. She’s judged him as an alpha, judged both his actions and inactions, judged him as a surviving member of their family. Now that they’ve been on the road for three weeks and taken time to recover from the previous month, she’s finally ready to be patient with him. “We were a little busy,” she says, hoping to lighten the mood. “Now we have nothing but time. We should talk about it.”

It’s fairly obvious that Derek doesn’t want to talk. Cora can hear him grinding his teeth together and it makes her feel sick, both the thought of his molars scraping together and the emotional mess that has caused him to react so negatively to personal questions. 

His hand finally drops to lay flat on the page of his book and then a moment later he snaps the novel shut, tossing it to the side. It bounces slightly on the motel mattress where it lands and then goes still. Derek’s eyes are still on it from where he’s sitting in a chair under the window. 

“What do you want to know and why are you asking?”

Cora moves to the edge of her own bed, sitting on the side closest to where Derek is. “Anything you’re willing to tell me, I guess. When you two were alone… was it like us, now? Did you travel for years before you ended up back in Beacon Hills? What was Laura like as an alpha?”

The questions come pouring out before Cora has even decided what she wants to know first. Derek looks up at her, brows furrowed, like he had expected something else. 

He sighs tiredly. “Laura wasn’t a conventional alpha, but she wasn’t a bad one. With an actual pack she would have really grown into the position, I think.”

“She never bit anyone?”

Derek shakes his head. “We weren’t interested in starting again.”

“But you did,” Cora points out. As soon as she says it, she knows she shouldn’t have. 

Looking tense, Derek stands up and grabs his jacket. “I’ll go get us dinner,” is all he says before taking his keys and disappearing, without even looking in Cora’s direction. He doesn’t actively slam the door shut behind him but the sound of it snapping shut in his agitated wake is harsh anyway.

It’s frustrating, but it’s also a start. Derek isn’t anything like the teenager Cora remembers from before the fire. It’s like she doesn’t even know him anymore, just like he doesn’t know her anymore either, but she’s trying to accept the person he’s become. 

She grabs a book of her own and leans back on her bed, wasting time until Derek comes back. She won’t be able to ask more questions tonight, but keeping up their normal routine is just as important as getting Derek to talk. Cora reads and waits and half an hour later, Derek comes back with takeout. His face is passive while he puts the food down and takes his jacket off, looking like his usual self, like he’s had time to blow off steam and forget their conversation. 

They watch the news while they eat and later when the weather comes on, they pick a new town off the regional map. 

“The weather looks good in Afton,” Cora comments. 

Derek nods. “I guess we’ll head in that direction then.” He never argues with whichever place Cora picks out.

The next part of their routine is going for a run. Cora pulls her shoes on without preamble because she doesn’t want to give Derek the opportunity to claim that he doesn’t want to go out tonight. He won’t let her go alone, so he joins her at the door. 

The sun has already set by the time they jog to the forest on the outskirts of town. The moon isn’t full enough to provide much light to the dark areas under the trees but once they’ve shifted they can see the uneven forest floor just fine. The forest is where they can run fast and feel free, hidden from prying eyes. 

Running with Derek makes Cora feel like she’s part of a proper pack. Her old pack in South America had gone out running all the time and they’d been able to howl to each other without worrying about the town’s people panicking or hunters tracking them down. It was a simpler time and a place worthy of being called a home. Beacon Hills hasn’t been a place like that for years but running with Derek feels close enough. 

The longer they spend on the road, the more Cora feels like they’re family again. What they have is stiff and awkward at the best of times but they’re still both Hales, both survivors, and that’s what matters. 

When they return to the motel room, they’re both sweaty and breathing hard and as usual, Cora steals the bathroom first. Derek never fights her for it and to show her gratitude, she cleans herself up quick so he doesn’t have to wait long. They’ve become creatures of habit and they’ve settled into it, butting heads and arguing far less than they had while living in the loft.

Running at night always shakes the restlessness from her bones and makes her tired enough that when she stretches out on her bed, her muscles relax immediately. 

Eventually, Derek turns the lamp off on his way across the room from the bathroom and plunges the room into darkness. Cora can see the outline of him lying down only a few feet away. 

“Can I ask you one more question?” Cora asks quietly. 

“Okay,” Derek agrees. 

Cora stretches her arm out underneath her pillow. “If you were still the alpha, would you start a new pack now?”

She can hear Derek sigh softly, though it isn’t a sound of annoyance. Maybe exhaustion, but not anger or annoyance. “No,” he says. 

“Because I’m here now.”

Derek doesn’t tell her she’s wrong, which means she’s right. It makes sense, now that she thinks about it. Finding a new pack to join in the south had been the only thing she could have done, as a preteen beta who thought her entire family had been home during the fire. But if she had found Derek and Laura before they all ran away from the town that had gone from home to Hell in an evening, she wouldn’t have wanted to let anyone else in either. 

“Okay,” Cora says, because saying something feels necessary. She hears Derek shift, as though getting more comfortable, and then they both fall asleep. 

 

 

Cora’s plan is to give it a few days, let Derek settle, let them both have time to breathe, and then ask something else. She already has a couple questions picked out and she’s only waiting until the air feels clear. It tries her patience and it’s frustrating that the seventeen year old Derek of the past would have never needed this much space, would never have needed to be handled with as much care as he does now. 

What surprises her completely is Derek asking questions in return, only two days later. 

“Were you an omega until coming back?” he asks while they’re driving. 

It’s his way of asking if she was alone the whole time, even worse off than him and Laura. His face looks stern and Cora thinks that if she were to say yes, he would be genuinely upset about it. 

“No, I had a pack,” she tells him for the first time. It had never felt right to mention them, there was no reason to and at the time, she thought it would piss him off somehow. But the way she understands Derek now is different; he wouldn’t begrudge her for moving on, he would be grateful that she hadn’t spent the last six years of her life in solitude. “There were eight of us and the alpha let me stay with her when I had nowhere else to go.”

Derek nods, eyes still on the road. “You never had trouble?”

“No hunters, if that’s what you’re asking. Complete opposite of Beacon Hills, that’s for sure.”

For a few minutes, Derek doesn’t reply. They keep driving, windows rolled down to let in the cool mid-morning air, and Cora watches the farmland fields go by. 

“Do you want to go back to them?” Derek finally asks. 

At first, Cora is stumped. It’s something she’s given a lot of thought but now, weeks later, she has still failed to come to a conclusion. Her South American pack means a lot to her but it isn’t the same. “I was always waiting for news of someone in our family surviving,” she says. Part of it had been oblivious innocence, an idea held onto by a little girl who still believed in miracles and happy endings, but she’d never really grown out of the hope, either. Even after years had passed and she was certain everyone was dead. 

“But it’s just me,” Derek replies, quietly, like he’s ashamed of being all that’s left. 

“It doesn’t matter if it’s just you. Just you is enough.”

By the way Derek’s jaw clenches and his grip on the steering wheel tightens, Cora thinks she’s said something wrong again. But the next breath he takes in is just shaky enough that she can hear it and there’s something there that isn’t anger. 

She drops it and Derek doesn’t ask more questions. 

It’s late by the time they reach Afton, late enough that when they walk into their new motel room, they toss their bags onto the beds and then walk right back out of the room again so they can run. They run until the stiffness from hours in the car dissipates from their muscles. 

Cora stays close to Derek, so close that he could conceivably tell her she’s getting underfoot. She runs close and when they break through into a clearing, she leaps at him. Derek turns in the air, getting an arm around her back before they tumble to the ground. The gesture screams protective and Cora only feels exasperated by Derek’s misunderstanding for a moment before she lets his older brother protectiveness make her grin. 

She rolls onto her back to keep their momentum going, but Derek just pulls her closer, so she nips at his shoulder. It’s a playful bite and doesn’t even break the skin despite her elongated canines, and that seems to finally make Derek understand. 

He lets her go so they can separate and then he waits, crouched low to the forest floor. It occurs to Cora that he hasn’t had someone to properly run with in a long time, maybe not since Laura. She’s certain Derek and Peter haven’t been close enough to unwind together, definitely not since Laura. He acts like he doesn’t know what to do next, and maybe he doesn’t, so Cora takes the lead. 

Jumping at him again, she swipes at his torso and he blocks it. He claws at her in return and when she easily twirls away from it, Derek relaxes into the motions of their game, letting go of his reservations. 

They wrestle in the grass, hearts beating fast in time with each other, until they tire. Cora ends up flopped across Derek’s chest, her head pillowed on his shoulder. She can feel the rise and fall as he catches his breath and the steady flow of it nearly lulls her to sleep right there. 

“Let’s get back to our room,” Derek eventually grunts, sounding reluctant. 

The tone makes Cora smile even as she forces herself to roll to the side and get up. She offers him her hand and he accepts it, standing with her help. Instead of jogging as they normally would, they walk back to the motel, so close that their arms bump together. 

At the motel, Cora jumps in the shower to wash the sweat and dirt from her body and after, she reads under lamplight while Derek takes his turn. 

When he’s done, she puts the book back in her bag and then crawls onto his bed, claiming one half of it for herself without asking him. Derek looks perplexed and unsure about this action but he doesn’t say anything. He sinks into the other side of the bed. 

“Can we talk?” Cora asks as she curls up on her side, facing him. 

After a moment, he nods and turns towards her too, waiting. 

“Did you two ever stop moving?”

“Yes. We lived in New York. Laura went back to school and I got a job, we had a small apartment together and kept mostly to ourselves. The city wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

“Wasn’t it loud? Big difference from the Beacon Hills preserve.”

“We spent a lot of time in Central Park. Laura could do her homework there and I’d just read. We couldn’t run there but it was a break from being surrounded by skyscrapers. We got used to the noise. You’d think it would be tiring, with all the people around all the time, but it was nice. Easy to be alone in a sea of busy people.”

“Wow, Derek. Depressing,” Cora says with a smirk.

Derek just rolls his eyes. “You asked, I’m telling you.”

She really is grateful for his willingness to tell her about the part of his life she wasn’t present for. She’s glad they’ve finally reached this level of comfort with each other again. “Thanks,” she says. 

The conversation comfortably stops there and they sleep. 

 

 

Talking becomes a larger part of their road trip. There’s less silences that are only broken by one of them turning the page of a book and their discussions of which town to visit next happen in between the stories they tell each other. 

Cora tells Derek about her South American pack and Derek tells her about meeting Scott and Stiles. Derek asks what school was like for her and Cora asks how Derek managed to deal with frustrating customers while he was working retail in the big city. Cora teaches Derek a few words of Spanish and Derek tells her what it’s like to fight a kanima. It becomes comfortable and Derek stops closing himself off. 

They’ve been gone a month when Derek gets an unexpected text to his phone.

Cora had forgotten that everyone in Beacon Hills still had both their numbers and that no matter how far the two of them travel, the old pack will be able to contact them unless they get new ones. It isn’t unwelcome but it does feel odd, after a month of nothing. 

The text is from Lydia. All it says is **Are you both still alive?**

 **Yes.** Derek texts back, frowning curiously at the screen as he waits for the reply. It’s early in the morning and they’re still in bed. Derek had woken up to the sound of the phone vibrating on the bedside table and Cora had woken up when he moved to check it. She shifts closer to him so she can watch the conversation over his shoulder. 

Lydia texts back, **Good** , and that’s it. Cora and Derek exchange a look. 

**Any reason why you were wondering?** Derek types out. 

It takes a few minutes for them to receive a reply, long enough that Cora nearly falls back to sleep. 

When the reply does finally come, Cora isn’t sure what to make of it. 

**Stiles was worrying.**

**Why?** Derek texts. 

**Because that’s what he does** , Lydia answers. 

“She’s so informative,” Cora says sarcastically, grumbling into her pillow. She feels properly awake now even though she doesn’t want to get out of bed. Beside her, Derek is typing out another text. 

**What reason does he have for worrying, then?**

After another couple minutes, Lydia replies, **It’s difficult to explain and it’s nothing you need to concern yourself with.**

Derek makes a noise of frustration and puts his phone back on the bedside table. “I’m not sure if she’s telling me to back off or if she’s trying to reassure me it’s nothing they can’t handle alone. It’s hard to know, with Lydia.”

“Could be both,” Cora suggests. She slips out of bed, shivering from the loss of warmth, and finds the remote control for the television. After returning to her place under the covers, she switches it on and flips through the channels to look for something to watch. They hadn’t picked a new destination the night before so they won’t be moving on, and she feels the need for the background noise while they spend the day relaxing. 

Derek quietly watches beside her, apparently not eager to get out of bed either. It takes him nearly half an hour to comment on the text messages. 

“Maybe something’s going on,” he says. 

“If it’s important, someone will tell you.”

“If I text Scott, he might tell me.”

He doesn’t move to grab his phone again, though. Cora isn’t sure what kind of relationship her brother and Scott have, other than how Scott denied being Derek’s beta. She gets that they’ve moved past it, she saw how they could work together back in Beacon Hills, but Derek doesn’t seem to have a single relationship with any of them that isn’t strained in some way. 

Turning, Cora reaches across Derek and snatches the phone off the table. 

“What are you doing?” Derek demands as he nearly grabs it away from her again. She moves further to the edge of the bed before he succeeds. “Cora.”

“You’re going to worry about it but not do anything, I know you are,” she says, bringing up his contact list. She has to scroll through B and E to get down to S and her chest feels tight when she sees that Derek has never bothered to delete some numbers. 

“I don’t care what they’re up to,” Derek insists, but it doesn’t sound like he’s even trying to convince her he’s being honest. 

Cora is already typing out a text to Stiles, anyway. **What has you worried that we’re dead? And no bullshit. –Cora**

Derek makes a choking sound when he reads the words over her shoulder. “Give me the phone, Cora.”

She rolls out of the bed and backs away from it, out of his reach. He glares at her and she smirks, unaffected. 

Stiles doesn’t text back for hours, at which point Cora and Derek have long since given up their game of keep away with the phone and have moved on to other things, wasting the day like they’ve been doing for weeks and trying not to think about the concerning texts. When the phone buzzes from where it got left on the TV table, it’s a race to grab it first. 

Derek wins. He opens the text and reads it, then offers it over to Cora, his face giving away nothing. 

**is it a crime to care about your wellbeing?**

Cora figures Derek wouldn’t have given her the phone if she wasn’t allowed to reply. **No, but it’s definitely suspicious –Cora.**

Stiles replies with a long line of ‘haha’ before following up. **thats because you guys are emotionally backwards. let me explain: when someone hopes youre not dead it means they want you to be ok and safe. there are no nefarious purposes or ulterior motives.**

“I think he’s talking around the point,” Cora complains. 

Derek’s face looks unsympathetic. “Not used to it yet?”

“Getting there. You want a turn?”

When Derek shrugs noncommittally, she tosses the phone over to him so he can read what he’s missed and reply. **We get it. Is anyone’s life currently threatened? –Derek**

The reply comes through quick and it makes Derek roll his eyes. **aw are you guys taking turns texting me? thats adorable.**

**Answer the question, Stiles. –Still Derek**

**No danger, promise.**

Cora makes grabby hands and Derek obligingly passes the phone to her. **Would you honestly tell us if something was happening? –Cora**

**haha probably not**

**You’re the worst.**

**since neither of you signed that one, im going to assume you both agree that im the worst and really, that doesnt surprise me.**

Cora shows the text to Derek and he sighs. “We’re not going to get anything out of him unless he wants to give it up.”

“Which means…” Cora starts, eyeing him closely.

Derek keeps staring at the phone, maybe waiting to see if Stiles says anything else, but eventually he just shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Cora rolls her eyes and types back to Stiles, **See you soon.** Then she shuts the phone off while Derek shoots her an incredulous look. “What?” she questions him with fake innocence. “You said it yourself. We have to see what’s going on with our own eyes or we’ll never be sure if everything is actually fine or not.”

While Derek’s facial expression goes through a series of stages, from frustrated to resigned, Cora starts to toss her things back into her travel bag. She keeps the phone, fully intending to leave it off so that Stiles can drive himself crazy wondering what they’re doing and waiting for a reply from them. If he’s going to withhold significant information, then they will too. 

Without a word, Derek starts to mirror her actions and it doesn’t take long for both of them to be packed and ready. They haven’t gotten their full money’s worth out of this room yet but returning to Beacon Hills at a leisurely pace doesn’t seem to be on their agenda. 

As they’re putting their things in the trunk of the car, Cora comments, “At least we’re already close by. I’ve been picking towns in the direction of California all week.”

Derek groans and rubs his hand over his face. “Why would you do that? I can’t believe I didn’t notice.”

“I was kind of aiming for that,” Cora says, smirking as she gets into the passenger side of the car. She continues once Derek is next to her in the driver’s seat. “After you told me about you and Laura… well, you two went about as far as you could without leaving the country, didn’t you? But you and I have only been a few states away. There’s something keeping us close.”

Derek looks disgruntled but he starts the car and pulls away from the motel without arguing the fact. Even if he wants to deny the pull Beacon Hills still has on them, he wouldn’t go so far as to refuse returning. Cora is sure that they’ve had a long enough break, that Derek’s had a long enough time to come to terms with a few things. 

She still hasn’t asked him to talk about Boyd or Erica and they have carefully avoided the subject of the darach. But Cora isn’t discouraged by that. She knows some things will take longer. 

“What about you, though?” Derek suddenly asks once they’ve been on the road a while. “You moved on from Beacon Hills and you didn’t seem thrilled to be there again. Are you sure you want to go back?”

The question reminds her of the night he asked if she wanted to return to her old pack. It’s almost as though he can’t believe it himself that Cora would want to stay with a small, broken pack in a town that only has bad memories when there’s a pack waiting for her somewhere completely different. Cora can see why that might confuse him. 

“This is where I need to be,” she says. “You were my pack first and you’re my pack now.”

Derek doesn’t pursue it so she figures she gave a convincing reason. There’s way more to it than that but it’s complicated and she isn’t sure how to put it into words, or how Derek might react to it if she could put it into words. For now, it’s enough, and she’ll have plenty of time to think about it later. 

They pass right through a few towns and Derek drives well into the night while Cora falls asleep in the seat beside him. In the morning when she wakes up sore, she groans at the sun in her eyes. “You either need to stop at a motel or let me drive,” she says. 

“You don’t have your licence,” Derek argues like he has many times during their trip.

“Hasn’t stopped me before. Just because I don’t have the card doesn’t mean I don’t know how.”

“We’ll stop for a bit,” Derek says, ending the discussion. 

They don’t stay at the motel for long, just long enough that Derek can catch up on his sleep, and then they’re on the road again. Cora had been happy to see Beacon Hills behind them but it feels right to be going back, now. She’d just wanted Derek to get a break and that obviously couldn’t happen as long as they stayed, where every supernatural force seemed to be against them, where Peter was still lurking. 

Halfway through the day, Cora finally turns Derek’s phone back on and smirks at the stream of missed texts that come up. The texts from Stiles go from oblivious confusion to incredulous to kind of excited and then back to incredulous. There’s one from Scott asking if they’re really coming back and one from Lydia scolding them for riling Stiles up. Cora laughs as she’s reading them out to Derek and he shakes his head in amusement. 

To Scott, Cora only sends, **It’s true.**

To Lydia, she texts, **Not sorry. –Cora**

Lastly, to Stiles, she texts, **We’ve been gone long enough, maybe it’s just time to come back. As long as you haven’t been hiding death and apocalypse from us, you have nothing to worry about. –Cora**

 **what do you think this is, sunnydale?** Stiles eventually texts back. It’s a reference Cora doesn’t get, but surprisingly enough, it’s one that Derek does. 

 

 

Driving into town is anti-climactic. Cora knows that expecting a rival pack or something even worse to jump out and attack them as soon as they set foot back into the territory is ridiculous but part of her still prepares for it. 

In actuality, they quietly return to Derek’s loft, which still has a lease made out in his name. There’s a thin layer of dust coating the furniture and it still feels empty even when they’ve half unpacked their things. Cora is used to Peter occasionally being around, and Isaac, until Derek kicked him out. Even after that, he’d been around. Cora remembers hearing his angry voice through the haze of mistletoe poisoning. 

“Now what?” Cora asks, looking around the dark apartment. 

Derek shrugs. “Go to Stiles’ house?”

After the last long stretch of their drive, Cora isn’t ready to settle in for the night and there isn’t anything else she would want to do other than find out what has Stiles worried. She thinks for a moment that Derek might want to connect with Scott, since he’s the resident alpha now, but it doesn’t seem to even cross his mind, just like how it isn’t her first choice of action either. 

“Yeah, let’s go,” she says, pulling her jacket back on. 

They jog the way to Stiles’ house, expending the energy they’ve had building up through their drive. They haven’t been out for a proper run since before Lydia and Stiles started texting them, and Cora welcomes the feeling of wind in her hair again. She hopes running together is a routine they keep up even now that they’re home.

Derek leads the way and when they reach the house, he circles around instead of going to the front door. The cruiser isn’t in the driveway, but there are still two heartbeats in the house. “Scott?” Cora questions but Derek shakes his head.

Cora watches with raised eyebrows as Derek jumps up on the roof and approaches a window. She follows him a moment later, assuming this must be how he usually visits the Stilinski house, and when they get closer to the room she assumes is Stiles’, she can smell familiar perfume that tells her the second heartbeat in the house belongs to Lydia. 

Derek gestures her forward as he opens the window so she can slide in before him. 

Stiles’ heartbeat spikes and he lets out a startled shriek. He accidentally flips his pencil out of his hands in his shock, but Cora catches it and tosses it back to him where he’s sitting on the bed with what looks like math homework spread out around him. Lydia is sitting at the desk, the same books out in front of her, but she either she isn’t as surprised as her study partner or she just doesn’t show it. 

“Could have given me a bit of warning,” Stiles grumbles once he recollects himself, “bunch of hooligans… Welcome back, though.” He perks up and shoves his math aside so the two of them can sit down on either side of him. 

Cora looks to Lydia when she asks, “So, what’s been going on?”

Lydia looks amused, lips quirking up just the slightest bit, like she knows Cora doesn’t trust Stiles to give them the truth. “The horror of calculus,” she answers, tapping her notebook with a pencil. “Other than that, it’s been quiet.”

Lydia’s heartbeat skips and Cora is about to call her out on it when Stiles cuts in. 

“Are you two staying or will skipping town have a repeat performance?” He sounds tense, though not entirely angry. Cora tries to commit the tone to memory so she can deconstruct it later. For now, she looks to Derek, leaving it up to him to have the final say.

They haven’t discussed it, just like so many other things they haven’t had time for yet. They’re working at it; Cora feels like she knows Derek now almost as well as she knew him when they were kids, and she’s had so much time to think about what he’s been through and how it’s changed him that she might even understand him. But this, she hadn’t wanted to assume and she hadn’t wanted to ask. She thinks he hasn’t wanted to ask her either, scared she might say she would return to South America now that he’s with the Beacon Hills pack again. 

They haven’t talked about it, but Cora is certain they’re in agreement anyway. Choosing to come home had been easy. They hadn’t hesitated, hadn’t wasted time, because they both felt drawn back.

Derek meets her eyes and they share a look for only a moment before he turns back to Stiles. “We’re staying.”


End file.
